Growing in Grace Testimonials

Is your "Good News" turning people AWAY from Christ instead of TOWARDS
Him?

Testimony of Barbara Buchner

I was born in Vienna in 1950, the oldest of three children.
My older brother died in 1985 in a motorcycle accident, the younger one
is alive, happily married and a great success in business.

I was raised a Catholic - Austria is 99% Catholic. My grandfather was
a builder and built the small church in our neighborhood, so when people
spoke of "the Church" I always thought of this little chapel and thought
that we somehow owned the church, because my grandfather served also as
a sexton (church servant). The priest used to come to our house to have
a glass of wine and chat with my grandfather, so religion was a rather
comfortable thing in my early years. Especially the priest never was harsh
on us in confession, whenever I told him I had once again beaten my brother
- which was my chief sin at the time - he would say: "Well, be sorry and
do better next time." I was a rather pious child, praying the rosary of
my own accord and also praying to Jesus whom I considered a very dear
friend and told everything.

When I quit school at eighteen, it was the year of the great turmoil
of the year 68. I felt a growing dissatisfaction with our little church
and the old priest who still considered me a little girl. I had many questions
he couldn't answer. So I looked around for a more satisfying type of piety.
At that time I also had a special problem: I went to art school after
my graduation and there I found many people with all sorts of beliefs,
some downright atheists, some what you would now call New Agers and so
forth. I was completely confused because I had grown up thinking there
was us Catholics and maybe a few Protestants and Jews (erring, but nevertheless
decent people) and that was it. Now I was in the middle of the great upheaval
of those years, amongst communists, New Agers and people with all sorts
of religions. I hardly dared open my mouth because if I agreed with A,
then B would pounce on me, and I wasn't raised to stand my ground in intellectual
debates. (My parents are of the "hush up and nobody will get hurt" sort.)

Now in that situation, wanting desperately to find an indisputable truth,
I met a group of x-ian fundamentalists, and suddenly it seemed all my
questions were answered. I had been warned of sects, but then people who
read the Bible and prayed certainly weren't sectarian, how could they?
My parents grumbled about the "sectarians" but also encouraged them when
they heard they were all for the family and children being obedient and
girls being demure and nicely dressed and so on.

Then, something happened that had a lasting effect. Until then, I had
thought Jesus liked me just as much as I liked him. Now they told me squarely
that He hated me, that He had prepared hell for me and would send me there
if I wasn't born again. It was a shock like finding out your beloved husband
is planning to murder you! This group was also strongly interested in
the occult and told me my flat was full of demons and they would come
in night and get me, and that if I was to die unsaved I would become a
vampire.

At that time, I had a dream I will never forget: I dreamed I was in a
crowd surrounding Jesus and suddenly felt a great desire to touch him.
I elbowed my way through the crowd and came up at his back. I cried "Dear
Jesus!" and he turned round and looked at me - and it was the sneering
face of the Joker in the Batman comics! Still, I got converted and was
immediately swallowed up in the group.

Now I won't say much about the years that followed, firstly, because
I guess you have heard the story a thousand times already and second because
I have forgiven those people and don't want to be reminded of them. Those
were years of constant fear and oppression, years in which I was constantly
afraid of the "invisible forces" around me and afraid of God, who - as
evangelical literature has it - loves to send all sorts of dreadful unhappiness
to his children and then demand that they praise Him all the same. It
seemed to me that, born again or not, punishment was my fate: First God
had punished me because of my sin, now he punished me to "make me grow
in the Lord". I never dared to say it out loud, but I had the growing
feeling that "free grace" was like a loan: first they hand you a lot of
money, and then you pay interest the rest of your life, much more than
you originally received. There was a saying "the devil promises much,
gives little and takes all." To me it seemed that was equally true of
Jesus: He had promised me "life, and life abundantly", had given me very
little and taken away all the joy and pleasure I might have had in life.
I grew to hate him, but I also was very much afraid of him, so I would
go on praying and testifying. I gave witness to my friends, but secretly
hoped that none of those dear, interesting and friendly people would become
a born again X-ian: all saccharine sweet smiles and icy cold eyes. Sometimes
I wished I were an animal, who would one day die and know no more. I was
an active member only for a couple of years, but though I got out of the
group, I never got out of x-ianity. I had many contacts with x-ians (by
which I mean the BAD sort of Christians) and until last year did translations
for an evangelical publisher.

It wasn't until 1993 that I decided to question the faith. Until then,
although I often hated it and constantly squabbled with x-ians about it,
I had never asked questions. The Bible was the Word of God, so if I didn't
agree with the Bible it was me who was wrong, wasn't it?

But I felt a growing interest in sects and cults, getting lots of books
to find out how they worked, how they draw their members in and mind-control
them. I learned a lot about how cults function - I finally wrote a book
about them - and I also studied the history of faith. I was baffled when
I read that Pietism was no older than the 17th century and Fundamentalism
no older than the 1920s. I had been told "the old-time religion" had existed
from the beginning until now, an unbroken chain of true believers whose
light was darkened by the menacing shadow of the Great Babylonian Whore
in Rome.

Well, a lot of things happened during these years, I married and got
divorced four years after that, I became a journalist, and then in 1986
my first book was published by an evangelical publisher (the same one
I worked for later on). He and I thought it was a very Christian novel,
but the readers resented it. It was labeled "satanic", and it not only
flopped, it made my name such a scandal in evangelical Germany and Austria
that I had to use a pen name for the translations I did - otherwise x-ians
wouldn't have bought them!

Then in 1990 my first children's book got published and was so successful
that suddenly I found myself a writer of children's books, while I had
wanted to do horror novels! By now, I have published 35 titles, mostly
juvenile books, but also a mystery story and two books of short stories.
At present Germany's most important publisher, Wilhelm Heyne, gave me
a contract for two books.(Horror novels at last!)

During that time, a girl from the "born again" group had left the group
and joined the Lutheran Church and through her I met the pastor there.
I had left the Catholic church and didn't want to go back even if the
Fundamentalists should prove wrong, but though I never went to his church,
I loved talking with the pastor. Imagine a very quiet, harmless-looking
man with a soft voice and a soft short beard and a penchant for innocent
jokes, and you have him. (It is important that he isn't a flashy personality).
At first I thought he was rather square the way he acted and looked, but
by and by I found out that this girl was right when she said: "He looks
as if he would fall over when you touch him with your little finger, but
he is really tough." You see, he was a man who would listen quietly and
respectfully to everything I told him, always trying to understand what
this and that meant to me, never judging rashly - and I DID tell him some
very kinky things.

During the last three years I also did psychotherapy with a doctor who
is both a theologian and a psychotherapist. I liked him very much and
all in all the therapy was a pleasure I looked forward to every week.
In the beginning, I debated theology with him, (he is a Catholic but the
Church hates him for his views), but then gradually my interest in religion
ceased. At the beginning of this year I told him I didn't want to talk
about religion, I wasn't interested in it any more. And this was exactly
how I felt.

Then shortly before Easter I put up my will and bequeathed my body to
medical science, but I wanted a farewell service held, and then somehow,
quite suddenly I decided I would join the Lutheran church. Than at Easter
night, I went to the service and there was Holy Communion. Now I had never
gone to the Lord's Supper in all my fundamentalist years because I was
afraid of being sinful and really thought if I took the bread with all
those sins in my heart I would choke on it. So now I stood there in that
candle-lit church when all the people walked forward to the altar, and
then I said: "Jesus, you know I am a sinner and will be a sinner for a
good while yet, but you have invited me to your supper and I accept the
invitation." So I did and I was deeply moved, because at that service
they used "real" bread, just an ordinary white loaf, and suddenly I realized
clearly: I had come to the faith hoping for real bread and wine, but what
they had given me were those pale, sticky little wafers that didn't nourish
nor satisfy. It became a symbol for me.

That Easter night I prayed as easily as I did when I was a young girl,
and now I pray almost daily. I have joined a charity group in that Lutheran
church, but I'll never join a "religious" group again - well, never say
"never", but I feel that in those groups one is constantly supervised
and told what to do and what's the newest fad in X-ianity. I still resent
the Bible and I guess it will take quite a while before I can open it
again. So I pray at home, but I see the pastor from time to time and tell
him of my adventures.

I have become almost whole again - oh, well, let's say all the parts
work, and I usually feel quite well. I am now living alone with my two
cats, Laila and Namira, and spend the greater part of my time writing
my novels and browsing through the internet.

And if you ask me if I am a Christian, I will answer like Joan of Arc
did when she was asked if she was in the grace of God: "If I am in his
grace, I ask that he may keep me in it, and if I'm not in his grace I
ask him that he may take me into his grace."